Will Asian countries accept African and Muslim refugees.

@ciccotelli

ASEAN has a history and record of accepting Rohingya refugees

@naval

Philippines accepted 400,000 refugees during the 70's and 80's.  

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2016/09/22/why-is-asia-mia-on-refugees/

 

 

By contrast, poorer neighbors in Southeast Asia have done better. In contrast to Japan and Korea, the Philippines agreed in 2015 to temporarily host a limited number of Syrian refugees en route to permanent resettlement elsewhere. As of June 2016, Malaysia was hosting over 154,000 refugees and asylees, including more than 45,000 Rohingya from Myanmar. As of spring 2016, Malaysia took in 68 Syrian refugees (31 of whom are children) of the 3,000 that the government had pledged to receive in a three-year period ending 2018. In some cases, Southeast Asian countries are essentially countries of first asylum, since they’re located near countries of origin like Myanmar, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

As of early 2016, Indonesia was hosting 13,679 refugees and asylum seekers (people who already filed asylum applications and are awaiting a judgement) in detention centers. Even if refugees chose Indonesia as a transit country, many ended up living there for years, waiting for the bureaucracy to let them move on. It is not unusual for these migrants to be “in transit” for 10 or more years in one country.

The Philippines also has the historical memory of admitting  400,000 refugees of wars in Vietnam and Cambodia in the late 1970s and 1980s—they were supposed to stay for two to three years, but many stayed well beyond that, with some becoming permanent residents at a time when the Philippines’ economy was in shambles.

 

How come there is no BLM in the Philippines?